Please Join Us For The Hungry Steppe Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan with author Sarah Cameron

The Hungry Steppe  examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries; and it forging a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in the ways Moscow had hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991.

Sarah Cameron is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she offers courses on Soviet history and the history of modern Central Asia.  She has held fellowships at the Library of Congress, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  She received her PhD from Yale University, where her dissertation won the John Addison Porter Prize for the best dissertation in the Arts and Sciences and the Turner Prize for the most outstanding dissertation in European History. At present, she is at work on a new book-length project examining the transformation of the Aral Sea basin over the Soviet era.

Thursday, February 28, 2019 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Voesar Conference Room, Suite 412 1957 E st NW, Washington, DC 20052 This event is on the record and open to the media

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The Central Asia Program (CAP) promotes academic and policy The Central Asia Program The Central Asia Program (CAP) promotes academic and policy research on contemporary Central Asia, and serves as an interface for the policy, academic, diplomatic, and business communities. Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University 1957 E Street, NW | Suite 412 | Washington, DC | 20052 (202) 994-9509 | infocap@gwu.edu Join our mailing lists

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